5 ms·

Indeed. Who needs all these price points? Why would anyone buy anything but the most expensive product? Companies are weird.

rbanffy 3y ago
> Why would anyone buy anything but the most expensive product? If I were to build a workstation on it right now, I wouldn't buy the most expensive one. My relatively modest compute needs don't come even close to what that monster is able to do. If you are IO-bound, why spend $3000 more on a CPU if you can spend that in memory, more/faster NVMe or HDDs?
- xxs 3y ago
  >NVMe You'd be limited by PCIe lanes (and memory bandwidth, 8 channel DDR5) The CPUs feature 128 PCIe lanes, compared to 7950x's 28.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    If you need more than 28 PCIe lanes, then you need the big one. In any case, 28 is still a lot of IO. It makes little sense to pay for what you won't need.
    - xxs 3y ago
      workstation - that would require some external GPU, so 8 or 16 lanes. 4 for chipset/USB. That leaves 8 or 16 pcie lanes for SSD, decent NVMe SSDs are 4 lanes, which means up to 4 fully enabled SSD, it's not much, esp. running RAID.
      - rbanffy 3y ago
        Not all work for workstations require a 16-lane GPU or four NVMe SSDs. Sometimes all you need is a lot of CPU cores and lots of memory at a reasonable, albeit not ludicrous, bandwidth. Although I work with 2-3 monitors all the time, I'm happy with low-end GPUs - I don't do much data visualization or 3D rendering. I mostly develop software, so I stand-up relatively thin ephemeral VMs and containers all the time. For me the core count and amount of memory is the limiting factor. To completely avoid any swapping, 64GB of RAM is needed, and more would allow me to keep a CI pipeline running all the time. If I need more space, I can spare one or two SSDs as bcache for a larger SATA array. As much as I'd love the biggest Xeon X, EPYC, AmpereOne, MI-300, or Grace Hopper under my desk, I have no need for that much power.
        xxs 3y ago
        My initial response was to: "If you are IO-bound, why spend $3000 more on a CPU...", the desktop ones just dont have the PCIe lanes to prevent the I/O bound case. You can run 3 monitors off a iGPU (if you dont care about 3D), overall your setup is a classic desktop, running lots of VM just requires memory as the processes don't do much but exist peacefully. 128GB on a desktop CPU is totally fine with 4 DIMM slots, there won't be ECC - which DDR5 doesn't fully cover, though.
scns 3y ago
If you pay for it yourself, you can upgrade to more cores later and save a lot of money buying a used CPU.
kcb 3y ago
This is nothing compared to the range of price points offered for server CPUs. I remember one Intel launch must've included like 50 different SKUs. It's clear that companies do not just buy the most expensive one.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  I guess everyone missed the sarcasm

rbanffy 3y ago

> Why would anyone buy anything but the most expensive product? If I were to build a workstation on it right now, I wouldn't buy the most expensive one. My relatively modest compute needs don't come even close to what that monster is able to do. If you are IO-bound, why spend $3000 more on a CPU if you can spend that in memory, more/faster NVMe or HDDs?

xxs 3y ago
>NVMe You'd be limited by PCIe lanes (and memory bandwidth, 8 channel DDR5) The CPUs feature 128 PCIe lanes, compared to 7950x's 28.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rbanffy 3y ago
  If you need more than 28 PCIe lanes, then you need the big one. In any case, 28 is still a lot of IO. It makes little sense to pay for what you won't need.
  - xxs 3y ago
    workstation - that would require some external GPU, so 8 or 16 lanes. 4 for chipset/USB. That leaves 8 or 16 pcie lanes for SSD, decent NVMe SSDs are 4 lanes, which means up to 4 fully enabled SSD, it's not much, esp. running RAID.
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      Not all work for workstations require a 16-lane GPU or four NVMe SSDs. Sometimes all you need is a lot of CPU cores and lots of memory at a reasonable, albeit not ludicrous, bandwidth. Although I work with 2-3 monitors all the time, I'm happy with low-end GPUs - I don't do much data visualization or 3D rendering. I mostly develop software, so I stand-up relatively thin ephemeral VMs and containers all the time. For me the core count and amount of memory is the limiting factor. To completely avoid any swapping, 64GB of RAM is needed, and more would allow me to keep a CI pipeline running all the time. If I need more space, I can spare one or two SSDs as bcache for a larger SATA array. As much as I'd love the biggest Xeon X, EPYC, AmpereOne, MI-300, or Grace Hopper under my desk, I have no need for that much power.
      - xxs 3y ago
        My initial response was to: "If you are IO-bound, why spend $3000 more on a CPU...", the desktop ones just dont have the PCIe lanes to prevent the I/O bound case. You can run 3 monitors off a iGPU (if you dont care about 3D), overall your setup is a classic desktop, running lots of VM just requires memory as the processes don't do much but exist peacefully. 128GB on a desktop CPU is totally fine with 4 DIMM slots, there won't be ECC - which DDR5 doesn't fully cover, though.

scns 3y ago

If you pay for it yourself, you can upgrade to more cores later and save a lot of money buying a used CPU.

kcb 3y ago

This is nothing compared to the range of price points offered for server CPUs. I remember one Intel launch must've included like 50 different SKUs. It's clear that companies do not just buy the most expensive one.

beebeepka 3y ago
I guess everyone missed the sarcasm